Video games, let’s do this

I don’t really play video games. To me, solving hard problems with code is about as interesting as it gets – Call of Duty, by comparison, can’t hold my attention. But making video games? All that is is solving hard problems every day… right?

There’s about ten million teenage boys who are desperate to get into the industry ahead of me, so it’s a pretty long shot, but here are my video game ideas. If you want to hit me up and get rich together on one of em, you know where to find me.

1. Drawing is hard. How about Draw Something! with drag and drop elements?

2. Oregon Trail…. on the moon!

3. Pioneer colony… on the moon! Alternate between first person hydroponic gardening, air duct repairing, moon buggy drifting, whatever, and long term moon-civilizing strategy.

4. Grocery Rush – I used to play Pizza Rush back in grade 7. It wasn’t anything much – you just drove your little car around delivering pizzas. The graphics were basically MS Paint calibre. Whatever. It was better than math class. Grocery Rush is like that but you have to run around filling your grocery cart with nutritious, thrifty choices. OMG, so educational. Maybe add zombies for pizazz? Nah, screw that. It’s a good idea on its own.

5. Bike polo! It’s hockey on bikes! A game is fun not just for the abilities it gives to players, but also the constraints it places upon them. In bike polo, you can only move forward, you have a large turning radius, if you go too slow you’ll tip over, and there is a sharp trade-off between top speed and acceleration.

Madden Hockey is a thing, so it’ll be like that. If you want to level up, you can trade points for foot retention (ability to hop sideways, higher speed), fixie mode (ability to move backward, better low speed balance) or a lighter mallet (more accurate hitting).